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Engineering the Revolution
Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815
Ken Alder
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Engineering the Revolution documents the forging of a new relationship between technology and politics in Revolutionary France, and the inauguration of a distinctively modern form of the “technological life.”  Here, Ken Alder rewrites the history of the eighteenth century as the total history of one particular artifact—the gun—by offering a novel and historical account of how material artifacts emerge as the outcome of political struggle. By expanding the “political” to include conflict over material objects, this volume rethinks the nature of engineering rationality, the origins of mass production, the rise of meritocracy, and our interpretation of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.

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The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661
Carla Gardina Pestana
Harvard University Press, 2007

Between 1640 and 1660, England, Scotland, and Ireland faced civil war, invasion, religious radicalism, parliamentary rule, and the restoration of the monarchy. Carla Gardina Pestana offers a sweeping history that systematically connects these cataclysmic events and the development of the infant plantations from Newfoundland to Surinam.

By 1660, the English Atlantic emerged as religiously polarized, economically interconnected, socially exploitative, and ideologically anxious about its liberties. War increased both the proportion of unfree laborers and ethnic diversity in the settlements. Neglected by London, the colonies quickly developed trade networks, especially from seafaring New England, and entered the slave trade. Barbadian planters in particular moved decisively toward slavery as their premier labor system, leading the way toward its adoption elsewhere. When by the 1650s the governing authorities tried to impose their vision of an integrated empire, the colonists claimed the rights of "freeborn English men," making a bid for liberties that had enormous implications for the rise in both involuntary servitude and slavery. Changes at home politicized religion in the Atlantic world and introduced witchcraft prosecutions.

Pestana presents a compelling case for rethinking our assumptions about empire and colonialism and offers an invaluable look at the creation of the English Atlantic world.

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Enlightenment and Revolution
The Making of Modern Greece
Paschalis M. Kitromilides
Harvard University Press, 2013

Greece sits at the center of a geopolitical storm that threatens the stability of the European Union. To comprehend how this small country precipitated such an outsized crisis, it is necessary to understand how Greece developed into a nation in the first place, Paschalis Kitromilides contends. Enlightenment and Revolution identifies the intellectual trends and ideological traditions that shaped a religiously defined community of Greek-speaking people into a modern nation-state--albeit one in which antiliberal forces have exacted a high price.

Kitromilides takes in the vast sweep of the Greek Enlightenment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, assessing key developments such as the translation of Voltaire, Locke, and other modern authors into Greek; the conflicts sparked by the Newtonian scientific revolution; the rediscovery of the civilization of classical Greece; and the emergence of a powerful countermovement. He highlights Greek thinkers such as Voulgaris and Korais, showing how these figures influenced and converged with currents of the Enlightenment in the rest of Europe.

In reconstructing this history, Kitromilides demonstrates how the confrontation between Enlightenment ideas and Church-sanctioned ideologies shaped the culture of present-day Greece. When the Greek nation-state emerged from a decade-long revolutionary struggle against the Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century, the Enlightenment dream of a free Greek polity was soon overshadowed by a romanticized nationalist and authoritarian vision. The failure to create a modern liberal state at that decisive historic moment, Kitromilides insists, is at the root of Greece's recent troubles.

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Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism
The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790–1800
Frederick C. Beiser
Harvard University Press

“They join the greatest boldness in thought to the most obedient character.” So Madame de Stael described German intellectuals at the close of the 18th century, and her view of this schism between the intellectual and the political has stood virtually unchallenged for 200 years. This book lays to rest Madam de Stael's legacy, the myth of the apolitical German. In a narrative history of ideas that proceeds from his book The Fate of Reason, Frederick Beiser discusses how the French Revolution, with a rationalism and an irrationalism that altered the world, transformed and politicized German philosophy and its central concern: the authority and limits of reason. In Germany, three antithetical political traditions—liberalism, conservatism, and romanticism—developed in response to the cataclysmic events in France.

Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism establishes the genesis and context of these traditions and illuminates their fundamental political ideas. Moving from such well-known figures as Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, Forster, and Moser, Beiser summarizes responses to the French Revolution by the major political thinkers of the period. He investigates the sources for their political theory before the 1790s and assesses the importance of politics for their thought in general. By concentrating on a single formative decade, Beiser aims to reveal the political values and purposes underlying German thought in the late 18th century and ultimately to clarify the place of practical reason in the German philosophical tradition.

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Equality and Revolution
Women’s Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905–1917
Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010
On July 20, 1917, Russia became the world’s first major power to grant women the right to vote and hold public office. Yet in the wake of the October Revolution later that year, the foundational organizations and individuals who pioneered the suffragist cause were all but erased from Russian history. The women’s movement, when mentioned at all, is portrayed as meaningless to proletariat and peasant women, based in elitist and bourgeoisie culture of the tsarist era, and counter to socialist ideology. In this groundbreaking book, Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild reveals that Russian feminists in fact appealed to all classes and were an integral force for revolution and social change, particularly during the monumental uprisings of 1905–1917.

Ruthchild offers a telling examination of the dynamics present in imperialist Russia that fostered a growing feminist movement. Based upon extensive archival research in six countries, she analyzes the backgrounds, motivations, methods, activism, and organizational networks of early Russian feminists, revealing the foundations of a powerful feminist intelligentsia that came to challenge, and eventually bring down, the patriarchal tsarist regime.

Ruthchild profiles the individual women (and a few men) who were vital to the feminist struggle, as well as the major conferences, publications, and organizations that promoted the cause. She documents political party debates on the acceptance of women’s suffrage and rights, and follows each party’s attempt to woo feminist constituencies despite their fear of women gaining too much political power. Ruthchild also compares and contrasts the Russian movement to those in Britain, China, Germany, France, and the United States. Equality and Revolution offers an original and revisionist study of the struggle for women’s political rights in late imperial Russia, and presents a significant reinterpretation of a decisive period of Russian—and world—history.
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Everyday Forms of State Formation
Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico
Gilbert M. Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds.
Duke University Press, 1994
Everyday Forms of State Formation is the first book to systematically examine the relationship between popular cultures and state formation in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Mexico. While most accounts have emphasized either the role of peasants and peasant rebellions or that of state formation in Mexico’s past, these original essays reveal the state’s day-to-day engagement with grassroots society by examining popular cultures and forms of the state simultaneously and in relation to one another.
Structured in the form of a dialogue between a distinguished array of Mexicanists and comparative social theorists, this volume boldly reassesses past analyses of the Mexican revolution and suggests new directions for future study. Showcasing a wealth of original archival and ethnographic research, this collection provides a new and deeper understanding of Mexico’s revolutionary experience. It also speaks more broadly to a problem of extraordinary contemporary relevance: the manner in which local societies and self-proclaimed "revolutionary" states are articulated historically. The result is a unique collection bridging social history, anthropology, historical sociology, and cultural studies in its formulation of new approaches for rethinking the multifaceted relationship between power, culture, and resistance.

Contributors. Ana María Alonso, Armando Bartra, Marjorie Becker, Barry Carr, Philip Corrigan, Romana Falcón, Gilbert M. Joseph, Alan Knight, Florencia E. Mallon, Daniel Nugent, Elsie Rockwell, William Roseberry, Jan Rus, Derek Sayer, James C. Scott

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Evolution and Revolution in Linguistic Theory
Studies in Honor of Carlos P. Otero
Héctor Campos and Paula Kempchinsky, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 1995

This volume presents essays by some of the leading figures in the vanguard of theoretical linguistics within the framework of universal grammmar. One of the first books to adopt the "minimalist" framework to syntactic analysis, it includes a central essay by Noam Chomsky on the minimalist program and covers a range of topics in syntax and morphology.

Contributors: Luigi Burzio, Héctor Campos, Noam Chomsky, Joseph E. Emonds, Robert Freidin, James Harris, Ray Jackendoff, Paula Kempchinsky, Howard Lasnik, Claudia Parodi, Carlos Piera, A. Carlos Quicoli, Dominique Sportiche, Esther Torrego.

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